Magazine

Who Made That Redskins Logo?

November 15, 2013

Who Made That?

By DANIEL ENGBER

When the newly formed Boston Redskins traveled to Chicago’s Soldier Field to play the Bears on Oct. 1, 1933, the visiting players were barely recognizable. The owner, George Preston Marshall, ordered team members to smear themselves with face paint before going out onto the field. His was the first pro-sports team to co-opt an American Indian identity with such fervor: The Redskins’ halftime band marched in tribal regalia; the coach wore feathers on the sideline; and Marshall had an Indian-head logo printed across the center of their uniforms.

Interest in American Indian culture spiked in the 1930s, says Sherry L. Smith, a historian at Southern Methodist University, but Indian iconography was already widely used. From 1859 until 1909, U.S. pennies showed an Indian face in profile, with a feathered headdress and a straight nose; Indian gold pieces and buffalo nickels with less-European-looking faces followed. The Redskins logo resembled these designs.

In sports, the Indian head conjured the perceived athleticism of American Indians. The scholar Ellen J. Staurowsky cites an 1897 article from The Sporting Life about a Penobscot batter on the Cleveland team, headlined, “Indian in ball: The race has a natural inclination for sphere games.”

Indian sports logos and nicknames may also have harked back to the Indian-only boarding schools, which excelled at collegiate sports. The Carlisle School’s football team, the Indians, was among the best in the nation. When Carlisle closed down in 1918, other (non-Indian) college programs were more inclined to use Indian names and symbols. The costumed Chief Illiniwek mascot at the University of Illinois debuted at a football game in 1926.

Baseball teams began using Indian logos a few years earlier. The National League’s Boston team (now in Atlanta) took the name Braves in 1912, along with a classic Indian-head image. The Cleveland Naps became the Indians in 1915, and in the late 1920s were decorating their uniforms with an Indian head.

It was another two decades before explicitly demeaning imagery replaced the stately profile. The legendary baseball promoter Bill Veeck became an owner of the Cleveland Indians in 1946, and commissioned a new, cartoonish design. The grinning, hook-nosed caricature, later known as Chief Wahoo, first appeared in 1947, the same year that Veeck desegregated the American league by signing the black star Larry Doby. Twenty-five years later, the Cleveland Indian Center sued the team for $9 million over the offensive depiction of a “smiling, dumb savage.” “Our position is that we have no problem with the team being called the Cleveland Indians,” a lawyer for the Center said. “It’s Chief Wahoo that is the objection.” (The case was settled out of court.) Some Indian-themed sports logos disappeared, but Cleveland players continue to wear Chief Wahoo uniforms, and the Redskins still use the Indian-head design.

Race Relations

J. Gordon Hylton, a historian and professor of law at Marquette University Law School, is the author of ‘‘Before the Redskins Were the Redskins.’’

Some baseball teams were using Indian nicknames as early as the 1850s. So why did it take so long for Indian-themed logos to catch on? Most professional baseball teams before the early 20th century didn’t have official nicknames. The Braves were known as the Rustlers, and they were called the Doves at one point, and then the Pilgrims and the Red Stockings. So there wasn’t a powerful incentive to figure out ways to represent them.

What made the Washington Redskins unusual? No one else felt like if they were going to use an Indian name, they would need to have Indian players. Marshall planned to use an Indian name as a way of marketing ‘‘Indian football.’’ Everyone else was just picking a name.

It’s well known that Marshall was an unapologetic racist. Oh, absolutely. Marshall would never have called his team the ‘‘Negroes’’ or the ‘‘Coloreds.’’ He also had this whole weird thing about the White Confederates and Indians being joined by some mystical bond.

How did that affect his use of Indian iconography? Marshall wanted the images to be dignified. He thought that having the band dressed up as Indians and the cheerleaders wearing these Princess Minnehaha costumes was not a caricature, but was, in an odd sort of way, respectful.

Correction: December 1, 2013

The Innovation column on Nov. 17, about the Washington Redskins logo, misspelled the name of the former costumed mascot at the University of Illinois. It is Chief Illiniwek, not Illiwinek.